Four Kinds of Fear

"You're lying."

Albert was on his feet. He had come up off the ground like a spring released, his back scraping bark, his hands out in front of him as if to push the words away. His face was blotched red and white. The fog on his glasses had cleared, and behind them his eyes were wild.

"You made it up. All of it. You're trying to scare us."

"Albert—"

"Don't say my name!" It was a hiss. He glanced over his shoulder at the wall, at the thin gray strip of sky, and dropped his voice to a shaking whisper. "You think I don't know what you're doing? You got a cloak and a table, and now you want us to be scared, because then you're the only one who knows. You're the big man with the secret. Well, I'm not impressed."

"That's not—"

"I touched something! That's all! Once! By accident! It was a piece of wood in a practice room, and it has nothing to do with any book, or any song, or any, any thing under the floor. You made that up." His voice cracked upward. "You made it up to make me afraid."

"You were screaming in the hallway."

"I was sleepwalking!"

"You called my name."

"I'd have called anybody's!"

The words rang off the wall. Ronald flinched. Karl stood stock-still, watching, and Cassian saw that his eyes were bright and intent behind the glasses, the way a cat's are when something small moves in the grass.

From the cloister came the clang of the bell. Three strokes. The end of recess.

Albert wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His whole body was shaking. He gave Cassian one last look, a look of such hatred and such terror that Cassian actually stepped back. Then he turned and pushed through the pines and was gone, crashing out into the yard with the branches whipping behind him.

…

"I believe you."

Ronald was clutching his arm. He had come up so close that Cassian could smell the porridge on his breath. His face was tipped up, round and pale and shining with sweat, and his eyes were enormous.

"I do. I believe you. Right away, from the start. I think I always knew something was wrong. I told Aldous, I said, it's not natural, the way they walk at night, and the Prefects never get tired, and Mr. Calloway reads the Catechism like his throat's got a stone in it." The words tumbled out. "Oh God. Oh God, Hale. It's real. It's real."

"Ronald, keep your voice down."

"I am. I am. I'm whispering. Look." He demonstrated, and it came out as a piercing hiss. "What does it look like? Is it big? You said tall. How tall? Taller than the Deacon? Does it have a face? Does it have claws, or fur, or is it more like a man, only wrong? Did it say anything? Did it touch you? You touched it, didn't you, that's how you got the Rector's attention—"

"Ronald."

"—and what's it eat, apart from animals? Does it eat people? Oh, God, it eats people. Does it—"

"Ronald!"

He stopped.

His mouth hung open. His eyes were glazed. Cassian took him by both shoulders, the way a man steadies a runaway horse, and held him until his teeth stopped chattering.

"Listen. You can't tell anyone. Not a single person. Not Aldous, not your cousin, not the cook. If it gets out, they'll know it was me, and then they'll know it was you. Do you understand? They'll move my mother. They'll put you on the Red List. You'll be—" He couldn't finish. "Just don't."

"I won't." Ronald nodded hard, several times, like a toy on a spring. "I promise. I swear. On my mother's life. I won't breathe a word."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

Cassian let go.

He believed him, too. That was the dreadful thing. Ronald meant every syllable. He was a creature made entirely of good intentions, and it didn't matter in the slightest.

By dinner, Cassian had seen him whispering with three boys from Room 98.

…

Karl waited until they were walking back across the yard.

The others had gone ahead. Ronald was already chattering to a knot of younger boys, his hands flying. Albert had vanished. Leo drifted ten paces behind like a shadow, his hands in his sleeves. Karl fell into step beside Cassian, so smoothly that it seemed an accident.

"I owe you an apology," he said.

"For what?"

"For the way I reacted. Back there." He walked with his head slightly bowed, in the manner of a boy confessing something he regrets. "You came to us in good faith. You took a risk. And I answered with, well, with skepticism, which was only my nature. I'm trained to doubt things. But I see now that I was unkind."

"It's fine."

"It isn't. I want to help." Karl glanced up, and his eyes were warm, steady, sincere. "Truly. If what you say is right, then we're all in danger. And we ought to put our heads together. I know the school. I know the filing system, the records. There may be documents. There may be something we can use."

"I don't know."

"Let me think about it." He laid a hand on Cassian's sleeve, lightly, and squeezed. "I won't breathe a word, of course. You can rely on me. Just give me a day or two."

"Thanks, Karl."

"Don't mention it."

He smiled, a brief, tidy smile, and walked on. And Cassian, watching him go, felt the first small cold pinch of unease.

It was nothing he could name. Just a feeling, the sort you have when a dog wags its tail too stiffly. He told himself it was fatigue.

At supper, he saw Karl cross the dining hall with a plate in his hand, and stop at the end of the gray table, and bend to say something to Tessa Quill.

…

That night, Albert did not sleep.

Cassian knew, because neither did he. He lay on his back in the dark with the hymn pulsing through the walls, and listened. The sounds in the room were small. Ronald's snore, whistling a little at the top. Karl's careful, shallow breaths. The creak of iron as Leo turned over.

And from the corner, Albert.

It was a ragged, rapid, panting sound, wet at the edges. A boy breathing through his teeth. It went on for hours. Once there was a soft rustle, as though he had sat up and pressed his fists against his eyes. Once, around three, a thin high whimper, instantly stifled. He heard the bed frame rattle faintly with a tremor that would not stop.

He knows.

He knows I'm telling the truth. That's why he's so angry.

He thought of getting up and crossing the room. Of sitting on the edge of the bed. Of saying nothing at all. But Albert's hatred lay across the dark like a drawn wire, and he lay where he was, and let the boy breathe.

…

The page was on his pillow in the morning.

He found it when the bell woke him, a single sheet of ordinary lined paper torn from a school notebook, folded once. The edges were slightly ragged. It had been laid carefully with the fold toward him, like a letter.

He sat up. The room was gray. Ronald and Karl had gone to wash, and Albert's bed was already empty. Only Leo remained, sitting on the edge of his own cot with his back to the window, tying his boot.

Cassian unfolded the paper.

There was one line on it, in the cramped, upright pencil he knew from the note under the pillow. No heading. No signature. No explanation. Just three words in Latin, written very small, in the center of the page.

Hospes, abi. Abi.

He read it twice.

He knew the first word. He had written it out forty times over the weekend. Hospes. Guest. He knew the second, too, with a slow cold prickle, because it was the verb he had seen in the last line of the hymn, its shape inverted, turned inside out like a glove.

Hospes, ne abeas. Guest, do not go away.

Hospes, abi.

Guest, go.

He stared at it, and the hair rose on his arms.

It was the same rite. The same words. But run backward. A command, not a plea; a dismissal, not an invitation. Whoever wrote it had taken the hymn that bound the thing in place and found, folded inside it, the thing that would let it go.

He lifted his head.

Leo had finished his boot. He sat quite still, with his hands on his knees and his face averted. A pulse beat visibly in his throat.

"Leo."

No answer.

"Where did you get this?"

Silence. The boy rose, picked up his satchel, and walked past Cassian's bed without a glance. At the door, he paused. His shoulders rose and fell once, in a slow, shuddering breath. His hand was on the latch.

And then he went out, and the door swung shut behind him.

Cassian sat with the paper in his hand and the winter light creeping across the stone floor.

He knows, he thought. Not just that it's real. Not just what's under the chapel.

He knows how to end it.

He had known it for years. And he had spent every day of those years in a room with a broken boy and a school full of frightened children, saying nothing, writing a note here and a word there, handing out handkerchiefs like a man trying to bail out a flood with a spoon.

Cassian folded the page and tucked it into his notebook, next to his mother's letter.

Then he got up, and put on his boots, and went to find out what Karl Brandt had been telling Tessa Quill.